CARIBBEAN, CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE

This essay presents a discussion of the development of the Catholic Church in the Caribbean islands in general and in specific areas not covered elsewhere in the encyclopedia. For further discussion of the Church in cuba, haiti, and the dominican republic, see those individual entries.

The Spanish Period. Of the four Greater Antilles only Jamaica and the western part of Hispaniola were lost to the Spanish Empire. By contrast, of the Lesser Antilles, only Trinidad remained in Spanish hands until 1797, while the Venezuelan islands of Cubagua and Margarita remain Spanish speaking until today. Even before the Spanish discovery of the Lesser Antilles on the second voyage of Columbus (1493) this chain of volcanic and limestone islands, that circles the Caribbean Sea on the East, was already diverging both in culture and inhabitants from the bigger Antilles. The Carib people that migrated from the South American mainland had exterminated the Arawak-speaking less bellicose Taino inhabitants from all the inhabitable islands except Trinidad. The Caribs were in the process of invading eastern Puerto Rico when the Spanish conquest interrupted the process.

Since the first encounter when the little Spanish fleet anchored off Guadalupe and Marie Galante (named after Columbus' flagship) in October of 1493, the Spaniards encountered fierce resistance from the indigenous peoples. Claiming the islands for Spain was easy; settling them effectively was altogether different. Most of the islands were named after saints or titles of the Virgin Mary to which Columbus had devotion: Our Lady of Guadalupe in Extremadura, Our Lady of Nieves (of the Snows) now deformed to be Nevis, Our Lady of la Antigua, Our Lady of Monserrat in Catalonia, St. Martin of Tours (now the island of St. Marteen), St. Ursula and her 11,000 Virgins and Martyrs (thus the Virgin Islands), the Holy Cross (St. Croix), the Most Holy Trinity (Trinidad) etc. The first evidence of Catholicism is to be found in the

pious names that the islands were given even if their first effective European settlers were rapacious, not very religious and largely Protestant (first the Dutch, then the French and English, and finally the Danes).

The Spaniards did not settle any of these islands, except Cubagua, which was rich in pearls, and neighboring Margarita which supplied the former. Various reasons explained this abandonment by the earliest Europeans who came to visit. First, the process of conquering and settling was very difficult and was delayed in Hispaniola until 1508. Secondly, most of the Europeans who came died from hunger and the West Indian disasters; hurricanes and droughts specially took their toll on the foreigners who had little capacity to adapt to the new and little food that the natives could offer them. Most of the smaller islands did not have water and had a very limited capacity to sustain more than a band of dwellers. This would continue to be true up to the middle of the 17th century for the new English and French settlers on the Eastern North American seaboard as well. Some of the islands are very dry and desert like (especially the Dutch islands off South America, the Bahamas and Barbados). Thirdly, on the islands where the Caribs lived, there was great resistance to the interlopers. Fourthly, they did not have any significant natural wealth or deposits. Lastly, these islands were always on the frontier: a sort of noman's land raided first by the Caribs, then by the pirates of various nationalities, personalities and intentions that roamed these seas after 1525. European conflicts always echoed in the Antilles, wrecking security. Many islands changed hands more than once. To summarize: climate, lack of food, natural disasters (hurricanes, volcanoes, sea and earthquakes), later the diseases brought by African slaves, dangers of attacks and lack of natural resources made the white Europeans liable to infirmity, death or insecurity. European settlements in these Lesser Antilles were always precarious and transient. Few descendants of the white Europeans remain in these islands even today.

The 16th century was characterized by raids and punishing expeditions on the part of the Spaniards. Some Caribs were enslaved and taken off to work in Puerto Rico by the settlers, who faced a labor shortage after disease and epidemics killed off the bulk of the Taino population in the Greater Antilles. The Bahamas were also raided to take the more peaceful Lucayos into forced service in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. The French in turn were venturing into the unknown waters of the Caribbean vying for the wealth they had heard about. The Wars between Spain and France over Italy and then over the French Succession and Protestantism spilled over into the Western lands that were up for grabs. When tensions increased with England over Elizabeth's definitive break with Rome, English explorations, raiding, contraband and terrorist attacks on Spanish settlements increased.

The establishment of the Church. The Catholic Church in the Spanish Antilles was built from the Crown down. King Ferdinand the Catholic asked Pope Julius II to erect the first three dioceses in the New World barely after these territories had been discovered and claimed for Spain: two dioceses for Hispaniola (Santo Domingo and la Vega) and one for the recently settled and "pacified" San Juan (as the island of Boriken or future Puerto Rico was then called). The Crown, which had control of the Church by virtue of the Patronato, meticulously chose the candidates for the new bishoprics: men faithful to the Crown and to the reform of the Church. Reformed Orders, not secular priests, were to be the selected clergy that would be authorized to travel into the New World. Even laymen could not be recent converts from Judaism if they were to be given permission to travel into the New World.

The first Successor of the Apostles to arrive in the New World was San Juan's Bishop Alonso Manso, on Christmas Day, 1512. He had barely two priests at his disposal in the whole diocese. Eventually he went back to Spain and made ecclesiastical rearrangements to make his diocese viable. The Diocese of San Juan's territory was augmented with the Lesser Antilles and eastern Venezuela and the Guyanas. The bishop of Puerto Rico was thus in charge of these fierce islands inhabited by Caribs. But not much was done to further the Evangelization of the difficult places. The friars that would spearhead the spreading of the Gospel in heathen lands more or less avoided these islands and went on to the Cumaná coast of Venezuela and also to the Guyanas where some of them were martyred.

The establishment of the Catholic Church in the Lesser Antilles and Jamaica, the Bahamas and the Dutch islands off Venezuela (Curacao, Aruba and Bonaire) would be entirely different from their Spanish sister Churches. In these islands, the Church was built not from the Crown down but from trickles of indentured servants who were Catholics in the English islands and from adventuresome planters in the case of the French islands, and only the slaves themselves (as was the case in Curacao). The late dates for the establishment of bishoprics in these islands contrasts dramatically with the first bishoprics in the Americas. The Spanish Crown's argument that the Holy See could not erect new bishoprics in territories claimed (even though not effectively occupied) by her was partly to blame. Most of the interlopers were not only enemies of Spain but also of the Catholic Faith. Except in the smaller French islands (Dominica, St. Lucia, Guadalupe, Martinique, St. Martin) Catholicism arrived unofficially or as a remnant of former Catholic Crown ownership (Trinidad).

Jamaica. In Jamaica no bishopric was established because it was a fiefdom of the Columbus family and it was not economically feasible since it had little gold. An abbacy was established. This was a sort of Apostolic vicar who had the right to make pastoral visits, decrees and corrections of erring priests. The first four "abbots" never arrived in Jamaica, only the fourth made it to the island of Don Amador de Samono. The next important abbot was Marqués Villalobos who arrived in 1582 and declared that the previous vicars were more interested in their revenues than in their clerical obligations. He was in charge of the island until 1606 when he died. There were only two main towns: Santiago de la Vega in the south and Nueva Sevilla in the north, near Ocho Ríos. The island only subsisted on agricultural products and some sugar cane. There were few natives who survived the germs brought by the Europeans and the working regime imposed by them, so black slaves, first brought to Hispaniola in the early 16th century, became the real survivors. Their "blessing" was having greater resistance to malaria and other diseases, as well as greater physical strength to work in the tropics. This became their curse. Jamaica supplied ships going on expeditions to the mainland with water, hides and other meat products. Pigs, goats and cattle were released in the countryside to reproduce for themselves and so as to guarantee the locals easy food resources.

In 1608 a very well known and scholarly cleric, a Baroque poet, don Bernardo de Balbuena was named Apostolic vicar of Jamaica. In 1610 his confirmation arrived from Rome (where the Crown presented its candidates for ecclesiastical offices). The Crown paid his traveling expenses. He finally embarked for Jamaica with his voluminous library, one priest, four servants and four black slaves. The war of Dutch independence started up again and crossing the seas was most dangerous, given the formidable presence of many Dutch vessels in open waters. The English were aiding the Dutch against the Spanish (who had also acceded to the Portuguese Crown) who had virtual European and American hegemony. Not many ships plied the route, especially to forlorn Jamaica, but he arrived safely. His parishioners were few and far between. He despaired at the difficult lives led by the Jamaicans. In 1620 he was promoted to a bishopric, that of San Juan de Puerto Rico. He now had greater hopes for a dignified life, but the Dutch got to him there. Fired by their successful excursions in northern Brazil and the East Indies, taking away some Portuguese trading posts, the Dutch arrived in San Juan in 1625 and burned the city and Balbuena's library as well. The poet who was a bishop died in 1627.

It was now the English's turn to attack Spanish dominions. They had already attacked Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico and Portobello in Panama in the late 16th century and had gone from transient stopovers for refreshments to their first permanent settlements (in uninhabited Barbados in 1625 and in Antigua in 1635). The Spaniards did not extricate them from these islands that were of no use to them. The Puritans now in power in London were very much eager to settle their own colonists in the New World. They had already tried New England, and after a near disaster, had managed to economically salvage the situation for the Pure Christian Commonwealth they hoped to establish in order to secure true religion against the unreformed Anglican Church, which they were fleeing. A post closer to Spanish quarters, on Providence island off Nicaragua, proved to be a disaster: the Spaniards did not tolerate this close intrusion into Cuban waters and they massacred the colonists who had dared to settle Spanish lands.

As a vengeance Cromwell decided to take over Santo Domingo. In 1654 a fleet sailed from Plymouth and after picking up recruits of ambitious arrivals in Barbados and St. Kitts, sailed for Hispaniola. In the failed attack more than a thousand died. As an afterthought and so as not to return empty handed they decided to attack Jamaica (1655). The frail governor surrendered to the scared Englishmen. All priests and the friars of the Dominican convent in Santiago la Vega, as well as lay Catholics were deported and could not carry their goods or belongings with them. But some of the lay settlers did not go along with the surrender and they freed their slaves and made them their guerrilla companions in the mountains of the interior. Thus began the long Jamaican experience of runaway slaves living on the mountain, a group that became known as the Maroons (from the Spanish word for runaway slaves). The guerilla war lasted for three years after which the Spaniards were finally vanquished. Their freed slaves did not lay down their arms. The treaty of Madrid on July 8, 1670, officially ceded Jamaica to England. Although it was not the first island to be occupied by European interlopers on the Spanish Main it was the first of the Greater Antilles lost by Spain.

After the restoration of the monarchy in England a Spanish settler in Kingston a certain Mr. Castillo, a slave merchant for South American customers, seems to have succeeded in getting permission from the pro Catholic King James II to have his private chapel. Father Thomas Churchill was allowed into Jamaica in early 1688 and not only officiated at Mr. Castillo's chapel, but seems to have gathered four parishes, including one in the former Dominican convent in Spanish Town. With the overthrow of James II, Catholicism was once again prohibited.

Port Royal, the new capital, became the center of Caribbean piracy, once Santiago la Vega (now Spanish town) was moved closer to the seaport. Henry Morgan made it his base of operations to raid Spanish shipping. It was very hard to properly survey the vast empire and keep it together. In 1671 Panama City was captured and so utterly destroyed by pirate Henry Morgan (d. 1688) that it had to be reestablished elsewhere. But Port Royal's reputation as an island Babylon came to an end with a seaquake that sunk it in 1692.

Jamaica was developed in the latter 17th and early 18th centuries as a great sugar cane plantation. It was also an entrepot for slave reshipments to the Spanish mainland. After the English learned the techniques of sugar cultivation from the Dutch, who themselves had learned them from the Portuguese in Brazil, they started to exploit its relatively fertile soil with great economic success. Barbados, which was a completely Protestant island, was the first to implement this changeover from the early tobacco experiments as a viable consumer cash crop. The changeover also meant abandoning the practice of indentured servants, poor white folks from Ireland, Scotland and England, who came for three or six years of labor intensive service and then would be freed to pursue their own livelihood. Massive slave labor was imported in order to feed the sugar cane plantation. Not until the middle of the 18th century were the nonconformist clergymen allowed with great hesitation to preach Christianity to the slaves. There was fear that conferring Christian Baptism and teachings to the slaves might empower them to fight for their dignity.

Some Catholics seemed to have lived in Jamaica at least covertly during the next century and a half. The only official priest on the island was the chaplain of the captured French soldiers defeated off St. Lucia. The penal laws were finally abolished in England in 1791, and for the first time the Catholics were allowed to have their rites and Mass celebrated legally. The State authorities had to approve a Catholic priest who would still have to be supervised very carefully. The Catholic bishop of London was given the charge of finding priests for Catholics resident in Kingston. Most of these were Spanish slave merchants. Franciscan Fr. Anthony Quigly was sent in 1792 to care for the souls of Catholics in Jamaica. By 1797 there were some more Catholics on the island.

Neighboring Haiti's massive slave revolt caused panic and obliged many slave owners to flee to Jamaica. Father Le Cun, apostolic vicar for Haiti arrived in Jamaica in 1799 in this manner. Father Quilgy had just died. These French Catholics played a significant part in the history of the Catholic Church on the island. Some regiments of North American blacks that had been given their freedom by the British, when they fought against the 13 colonies, were brought to Jamaica as free blacks. They organized the first Baptist churches in Jamaica.

In 1811 a Spanish merchant in Kingston built a Church at his own expense for Catholics, and also brought Joao Rodríguez, a Portuguese Augustinian priest from Veracruz, Mexico to tend the flock, which consisted of French refugees from Haiti, Spanish émigrés from Cuba and a few Irish and Dutch Catholics. In 1821 there were only two priests in Jamaica. One of them, Father Blake, complained to the new apostolic vicariate of the English West Indies, Bishop Buckley, that the other did not share the emoluments with him. But the bishop confirmed Father Rodríguez and gave him ample faculties to name worthy priests in case he had to leave the island.

In 1838, when slavery was abolished in Jamaica very few slaves had owners who were Catholic and thus very few were Catholic. Most were non-conformist Moravian, Baptists and Methodists, as well as Anglicans. Catholics, though, had been a significant minority in Jamaica. When Spanish born Franciscan Father Benito Fernández fled the war of Independence in New Granada (future Colombia) he came to Kingston and helped Father Juan Araujo take care of his flock. After Father Araujo returned to Portugal in 1824 Father Fernández had lots of problems with itinerant diocesan priests and he asked the Holy See to send religious priests to help him. He was also named apostolic vicar (1837) for Jamaica and two other British territories: Bahamas and British Honduras (future Belize).

These are other very pervasive realities in all the Antilles throughout much of its last three hundred years: foreign-born religious clergy have been the predominant Evangelizers, not the diocesan clergy. Also the Holy See has tried to follow Church connections through the dominant colonial master. In Cuba and Puerto Rico, for example, it was through the Spanish government and Church that the Holy See worked. Rome tried to tie both islands ecclesiastically (since Puerto Rico was dependent on Santiago de Cuba until 1901), following the political bonds between them. Catholics in English islands were entrusted to London, and Dutch religious orders worked in Dutch islands. In extreme cases language connections were followed, with the young Baltimore Diocese taking charge of some of the English islands during turbulent times.

With the arrival of the Jesuits in Kingston, sent by the Holy See in December of 1837, the pastoral situation changed dramatically and for the better: Catholicism could be cultivated in the countryside, outside of the pressing needs of urban Kingston. In 1850 other Colombian Jesuits came to help and founded St. George's College in Kingston, a well known educational institution in Jamaican life which was to be the school of many important leaders of the future nation. After the death of Father Fernández in 1855 all apostolic vicars were to be Jesuits. Indeed the first bishop of Jamaica (consecrated on August 15, 1889) was a Scottish-born Jesuit, Bishop Charles Gordon. He brought sisters from Great Britain to take charge of an orphanage. When he died, Father John J. Collins, SJ, was made bishop in 1907. By then the American Jesuit province of Maryland-New York was in charge of Jamaica. Kingston was to have a succession of Jesuit bishops until Archbishop Samuel Carter, a Jamaican Jesuit of black and East Indian extraction, in 1970.

After the refusal of many freed slaves to continue to work as sugar cane laborers, and their preference to live as subsistence farmers in the countryside, the British decided to go back to their first solution: indentured servants. But Europeans were not willing to do this anymore. In order to stave the economic downturn of ever rebellious Jamaica, the colonial authorities decided to import workers from two other parts of their far flung empire: Hindu and Muslim East Indians and Chinese. This new policy of labor exploitation was to especially transform the island of Trinidad and the South American enclave of British Guyana. Blanche Aquee, the first Chinese convert girl in Jamaica (1904) was the instrument for the conversion of two thirds of the Chinese to Catholicism. As in Trinidad, fewer East Indians converted to Catholicism. The East Indians kept their traditions and their religious practices. This has meant that the English Caribbean has a very complex ethnic, religious and cultural diversity. In 1929 Bishop Dinand started the first native congregation for women. Others have since sprouted, aside from foreign congregations that are also helping on the island.

Efforts to increase native presence in the clergy also bore fruit with the foundation of St. Michael's Seminary in 1952, especially with the degree granting faculties given to it by the University of the West Indies. Many earlier priests had been trained by religious orders or in diocesan seminaries in Great Britain or the United States. Jamaican native priests were to become bishops all throughout the English islands. Social work with lepers has also been a particular feature of Jamaican Church life.

After the Second Vatican Council permanent deacons have become a feature of Jamaican Church life, as have special lay ministries. There is a very serious and well-planned effort to reach out and convert unchurched Christians. Certain features of Evangelical enthusiastic charismatic life have been blended in Jamaican Catholicism, where some features of Latin American Catholicism (e.g., Marian devotions) are not salient. In this and other English islands where Catholics are a minority excellent relations with other Christian denominations prevail. Indeed in some of the British Virgin Islands Catholic parishioners aren't sufficient in number and wealth to have their own Church buildings, so they celebrate Mass at different hours than the local Anglican congregations in the Anglican Church. As in all other islands, big or small, among the varied pastoral problems some are in the forefront: family life tends to depend on mothers, since fathers tend to abscond or leave the household. Also there is a resurgence of traditional African religious and syncretic sentiments and practices (such as the Rastafarian movement which began in Jamaica in the 1930s, which have also found followers in other English-speaking islands like Grenada, Trinidad and Guyana or the Kumina cult or the Jordanite Movement) and a Pentecostal attack on Catholic parishioners.

The high hopes and expectations for a better life that independence brought in 1962 have largely disenchanted most of the population and many thousands of Jamaicans and other West Indians have migrated first to Great Britain (until the gates were practically closed in the early seventies) and especially to the United States. Endemic poverty has bred violence (especially in crime ridden Kingston, some sections of which are dominated by gangs) and drug trafficking. In Jamaica the recent killing of some foreign-born Catholic priests involved in social work has been very disturbing. Most of the economies of the Lesser Antilles depend on tourism, which can be a source of income but also a ghetto experience for the locals, "distanced" as they are from these very wealthy places where the idyllic Caribbean is evoked in immediate proximity with abject poverty. Tourism has also brought with it prostitution and lifestyles which bring radically different values to the countryside people. In these islands there is a very definite search for a peculiar identity. They have deep African roots but nonetheless they are very different from the Africa that their forefathers let behind many years before. This is evident when they encounter African priests who occasionally help out in the West Indies: they are very different from the West Indians just as the Creoles are from their European forbearers.

The Diocese of Montego Bay was created in 1967 and had Bishop Clarke, a St. Michael's Seminary alumnus, as bishop. He was later promoted to the Kingston Archdiocese and Bishop Charles Dufour, also Jamaican and former rector of St. Michael's was made bishop of Montego Bay. The Apostolic vicariate of Mandeville was created in 1997 and has Monsignor Michael Boyle, an American Passionist, as bishop. Vocations remain critically low in order to meet the demands of parish life in the country. Seminary formation has recently been moved to the St. John Vianney and Martyrs of Uganda Seminary in Tuna Puna, Trinidad, combining the ecclesiastical resources of all the English-speaking islands. But localism prevails in the Catholic populations of the islands. The French islands, for example, have always been rather aloof from the rest of their neighbors, be they Spanish, English or Dutch.

Trinidad. Columbus discovered Trinidad on July 31, 1498 on his third voyage. Like contemporaneous Puerto Rico, it was a battleground between Carib and Arawak. The Spaniards raided it to get slaves for the neighboring island of Cubagua's pearl business. In response to both of these attacks the Arawaks moved their settlements inland. Attempts to settle the island were made in 1532-34 and again in 1569 from Puerto Rico but these failed. Only in 1592 was the first settlement of a permanent nature founded: the present day Saint Joseph (San José). Antonio de Berrio, its founder, was not authorized by the Crown to settle so he was ordered to leave, which he refused. The Crown authorities in the Audiencia or Royal courts in Santo Domingo, which had civil jurisdiction over the island, were impotent to do anything. For 20 years no Spanish ships arrived on the island.

Not having any particular interest for the Spanish, who themselves were overstretched over the two continents and the Philippines as well, the island lead, like other Greater and Lesser Antilles a rather sad subsistence. Isolation was the best way to describe the situation in Trinidad throughout the 17th and 18th century. Contraband sales of tobacco were the only ways its dwellers could survive. The bishop of Puerto Rico, which had ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the island, argued that the natural right of people to survive overrode human laws making a trade, which brought food and clothing illegal. He himself was also involved with the trade. Starvation or serious poverty was the other option. Spanish shipping had a monopoly of commodities but the system did not work: it could not supply the Antillean domains. However, this illegal tobacco trade with the Dutch, French and English could not compete with the Virginia and Barbados tobacco production.

The native villages produced tobacco for themselves and for the vecinos (householders). The Dutch took neighboring Tobago in 1632. From 1613 onwards a Spanish ship was supposed to visit Trinidad every year. In 1687 Capuchin missionaries from Catalonia, who had been working in neighboring mainland Cumaná came to Trinidad and gathered ten native villages or self-contained reducciones (segregated entities) also called misiones de viva conversión. In these towns the friars had absolute authority over the converts. The locals, however, wanted native labor for their cocoa plantations. This contradiction surfaced again and again: could there be authentic evangelization with forced labor? As had happened in virtually all situations where friars evangelized the natives apart from the Europeans or Creole (be it California or Paraguay) the civilian authorities got the Crown to eventually expel the priests and incorporate the natives into the colonial administration so that they could be subject to the exploiters more directly. In 1708 the missions were transformed into misiones de doctrina and thus the secular clergy was in charge of the affairs of the former misiones de viva conversión. The Capuchins argued the natives were not ready for the change, but their appeal was lost. The friars left. After their departure only four of the missions survived. The secular clergymen did not know the native language and they were not trained to supervise the daily lives of so many new parishioners.

Starting in 1727 the cocoa trees, from which chocolate was extracted, started to fail in their production. The locals migrated and only 250 free men remained on the island. The Franciscan convent in Port of Spain withered and the last Franciscan died in 1790. The convent was then turned into a hospital.

It was only after the reformist King Charles III came to the throne in Spain that the economic development of these dormant islands took place. The Empire was reorganized in 1776 and Trinidad was put under the jurisdiction of the newly created Viceroyalty of New Granada, whose capital was Bogotá, and under the immediate tutelage of the intendencia or administration of Venezuela. In 1765 there were 2,503 inhabitants in Trinidad: half were natives and the others free whites. In 1783 a Royal decree (cédula) was issued encouraging efforts to populate Trinidad with French settlers that had been displaced from their islands now handed over to the British. A year later they and their slaves accounted for more than twice the number of original settlers. British subjects of Irish extraction (supposedly Catholics) followed the French. From 1785–1787 the population grew rapidly, half of it being the black slave population brought by the wealthier planters who moved in (especially from 1777–1783) or bought from the British islands and even from Africa itself. In the new capital, Port of Spain, French was the more commonly used language. Trinidad cotton was being exported via Grenada to England. Even older Spanish planters relied on English credit not only to provide machinery and equipment for the sugar cane plantations but also to supply their basic needs. Militias were finally organized.

Slave mortality was impressive: in 1788 alone some 893 slaves died. British traders controlled Trinidad henceforth. In 1782 the British tried to negotiate with Spain proposing an exchange of Western Florida for Trinidad but Spain refused. The British had their covetous eyes on Trinidad, especially after acquiring the neighboring former French islands of St. Lucia, and in particular because of its proximity to British Guiana. In order to defend itself the Spanish government relied on the British traders to loan money and buy rations and military equipment. In 1794 this frontier island had close to 16,000 people, with the great majority of inhabitants being non-Spanish foreigners and their slaves.

In 1790 Pope Pius VI created the new Diocese of Guyana, a suffragan see to Santo Domingo, removing Trinidad and eastern Venezuela from the Diocese of Puerto Rico. A Venezuelan was named bishop, but there was no effective supervision of Trinidad.

British Trinidad. In 1796, under pressure from France, Spain declared War on Britain. Trinidad and Puerto Rico were immediately put on the lists of priority for a British attack. On Feb. 16, 1797 a British naval expedition landed more men than there were inhabitants on the island. British desires were fulfilled when they captured the unprepared island of Trinidad in military action, followed by a quick surrender by the Spanish governor. Puerto Rico repulsed the same invaders later in the year. In the peace negotiations that took place in March of 1802 Trinidad was ceded to Britain. Many French and Spanish settlers left for the mainland, but most stayed on.

The British governor of Trinidad, Picton, wanted English priests to be sent to Trinidad. He made this known to the Roman Catholic vicar apostolic of London. But the Congregation of the Propaganda Fide in Rome wanted to make sure the island was to be severed from Spain and thus from the Guyana Diocese: "the Church is not accustomed to change easily the limits of dioceses with changes made by the civil authorities" wrote Cardinal Gerdil to Bishop Douglass in London on May 8, 1802. The governor was very displeased with the Spanish priests ministering to Catholics in Trinidad and he dismissed from his duties the vicar forane (or principal priest on the island). It was a strange situation with a Protestant governor acting as Royal vice-patron of the Catholic Church while mingling in the affairs of the local Catholic Church. The next governor, Woodford, also acting as vice-patron, would also suspend priests and even issue approvals of marriage cases for Catholics.

Finally the British governor contacted the bishop of Guyana and the bishop ordered the reinstating of the vicar forane in Port of Spain. In the meantime the governor was encouraging Venezuelans to revolt against Spain. No episcopal visits were ever made to Trinidad during this time that it officially belonged to the Guyana Diocese. The upcoming wars of independence of Venezuela and the disruptions of ecclesiastical life that followed would leave the Guyana Diocese vacant until 1841.

During the Revolution many French priests were either expelled or fled the country, some came to North America, but they did not come in significant numbers to the Antilles. Their presence was also discouraged by the British even if they were to minister to the French-speaking planters because the British feared that they would be tainted with republican ideas. In 1802 there were eight priests in all of Trinidad; they were all Spanish. Baptisms and weddings usually took place in private homes. By 1817 there were no more native churches.

The declaration of the war of independence in 1810 by Simon Bolivar in Venezuela caused serious problems of an upsurge of royalists and insurgent refugees in Trinidad. Almost 6,000 refugees came to Trinidad from 1814 to 1819. About 12 priests came over as well, but since their political ideals (in favor of insurgence) were not always in conformity with those of the bishop of Guyana, they were not granted faculties to serve as priests and thus worked as unpaid assistants. The problem with these priests was that they could not hear confessions in French, and many parishioners spoke only French. Some were mere adventurers. Most of the lay people were not very instructed in the Faith. No Spanish ecclesiastical monument in Trinidad has survived into our times, a small sign of the precarious nature of the Faith on the island.

In the meantime Protestant settlers and Anglican minister were encouraged to move in, but they never became a significant force in the land. In 1809 Methodist and Presbyterian ministers came to Trinidad, but they complained that the government did not give them full freedom to evangelize. Not until 1835 did these denominations come to stay with a more permanent presence. In 1815 a disbanded regiment of North American black slaves who had been given their freedom by the British for having fought against their revolutionary masters was brought to Trinidad; most of these were Protestants. In 1822 another group of disbanded former slaves were given lands in Trinidad and settled there.

British rule would totally and substantially transform Trinidad, though the basic formative years of Spanish domination would keep it from becoming another Antigua or Jamaica: slave islands dominated by absentee Europeans and a few local merchants and supervisors. Trinidad was so late in the English fold that it could not be transformed, as had happened with their other possessions, into massive sugar cane producing islands. The slave trade would be abolished in 1810 and thus the traditional labor force needed to clear the relatively untouched lands of this largest of the Lesser Antilles was closed off. Two thirds of the free population was composed of native peoples. Some English settlers wanted immediate transfer of the legal system to a British system, but the free natives were in such a majority that representative government would fall in their hands, thus the Spanish law was upheld. By 1807, however, the colony was bankrupt. And to complicate matters further, a fire in 1808 destroyed most of Port of Spain.

After the Napoleonic upheavals of the Roman Curia subsided and before the Propaganda Fide began its work, the situation of Catholics in the former islands that belonged to Spain or France and were now British was difficult. London had no diplomatic linkage with the Holy See and Catholics in Britain itself were only tolerated. Finally in 1818 Pope Pius VII appointed Father Thomas Gillows as vicar apostolic for the English and Danish Antilles. Due to his health problems he could not assume his office and Father James Buckley replaced him. In June of 1819 he was ordained the first Catholic bishop for the English West Indies. He wisely chose to reside on the island with the highest Catholic population of the English Antilles: Trinidad.

Aside from being tolerated by the British government and its representatives (who mostly suspected Catholics of being covert enemies of the Crown and subjects of a foreign potentate called the pope), Bishop Buckley's major problem was to find priests to staff his parishes. He first tried to find priests from neighboring islands who could speak French and English but this did not produce the desired results. In 1823 there were two priests in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, one each in Monserrat, Grenada and St. Vincent, two in Jamaica and three each in Dominica and St. Lucia. He had nine priests in Trinidad. He appointed Abbé Le Goff, a French expatriate who had spent time in England and Martinique, as vicar general in Trinidad. He then went on to visit his islands (1822) and found that Spanish-speaking priests who had fled the mainland manned most of them. They usually did not have any assigned salary but some were rather well off given the fact that most of the islanders (be they free, manual laborers or slaves) were Catholics, while the merchants and government employees were Protestants. The only priest in some of the islands made his living off the stole fees that are received on the occasion of the celebrations of Sacraments. The situation was particularly difficult in Monserrat, visited in 1822, where the Catholics (mostly descendants from Irish indentured servants) had retained their faith in spite of the fact that had heard no Mass and had not seen a Catholic priest for 26 years. Some of the upper class girls had been sent to study in English convent schools and knew their doctrine quite well. In order to solve this problem the bishop left Trinidad in 1825 for London and Rome. One of the issues that took him there was recruiting priests, especially from Ireland. He managed to get a Spanish priest and an English priest to come. But the British authorities saw Irish priests, like French priests before them, as untrustworthy and dangerous. They were deemed unfit and potentially rebellious, coming, as they did from the lower classes. Only two priests were allowed to come from Ireland: one to Grenada and later to Montserrat, and a Dominican, Father Hynes, to Guiana, where he was later to become bishop.

The second problem he faced was the issue of mixed marriages. Since Trent Catholic law required an oath on the part of the non-Catholic party to raise all the children as Catholics. The bishop urged that only a promise be required. A very high pastoral risk was to be taken if the oath would be demanded of Protestant partners. The good relations with the government officials and the government paying salaries of some priests, as well as Catholics abandoning their faith in order to marry Protestants unwilling to make the oath would be some of the sad consequences of such a strict requirement. Finally Rome consented and relaxed the oath from Protestants, making it a promise. A third problem Bishop Buckley encountered was the construction of decent parish churches. There was also the issue of the cost of religious instruction, which he tried to convince the Colonial Office to subsidize. As was the case in Jamaica, the Catholic Church would have a significant impact in the education of 19th and 20th century Trinidadians.

The British government's solution for the faltering economies of the other islands that depended on sugar cane cultivation was to bring indentured servants from Africa and the Indian subcontinent. The two British possessions that received a larger proportional share of East Indians were Trinidad and Guiana. From 1838 to 1914 Trinidad received almost 144,000 East Indian laborers who would come over on a five-year contract. After ten years of residence they would receive a subsidized return ticket to India. Many of the owners did not provide much of housing or medical care and not all paid their workers the same wages given the Creole workers. Certainly, the white-black-Arawak mixture was complicated with Chinese and East Indian indentured servants. Most of them retained their traditional religions: Hindu sects and Islam, but some were converted to the Catholic faith and others came into it by mixed marriages.

Religious orders, especially from Great Britain and Ireland, would eventually bring the pastoral solution for the scarcity of priests in the Lesser Antilles. The Dominicans and Benedictines from England and Holland would establish themselves in Trinidad, Jamaica, Curacao and St. Marteen. The American Jesuits and Passionists would also come to Jamaica. Other religious orders would take over in the smaller islands, like the Redemptorists in the Danish Virgin Islands. Not only did they start recruiting native West Indians as novices and eventually as religious priests, but they would also sponsor the St. John Vianney and Ugandan Martyrs Seminary in Tuna Puna, Trinidad, an institution first associated with a Benedictine Abbey, as a formation place for native diocesan priests. Female religious orders also increasingly became staffed and lead by native West Indian sisters.

Anthony Pantin was made Archbishop of Port of Spain in 1967. In 1976 Trinidad and Tobago got their independence from Britain.

Curacao and the Dutch Islands. The Dutch Islands were colonized under the auspices of the West India Company, which ruled these places until 1791, when the Crown took over the direct rule of the islands from the Company. According to the Spaniards Curacao, Bonaire and Aruba were useless islands. In the 1630s, however, salt ponds attracted the Dutch. Smuggling goods and slaves into Spanish America (Puerto Rico, Cuba, Venezuela and Colombia) was to become their big business. Only they had the fleet to accomplish this, and they had also developed the African contacts to provide them with their human cargo. Jews had a very significant part in this trade as well. No cash crops could really grow well in these dry islands: they became the slave entrepot of the New World.

The reformed Church officially banned Catholics from living on the islands, but just as the Dutch merchants in the Indies specialized in smuggling, they also learned to tolerate Catholics as part of sound business. The Coro Diocese in neighboring Venezuela (founded in 1531) claimed jurisdiction over these islands that lay so very close. When the Diocese of Caracas succeeded the Coro Diocese as the north Venezuelan See, it also claimed the islands. The Bishop of Caracas gave faculties to resident priests in Curacao to be vicar generals there. Priests from Venezuela came over to care for the flock. Occasionally religious priests would work in Curacao, such as Jesuit Father M. Schabel from 1704–1713. The Propaganda Fide in Rome made an apostolic prefecture of the islands in 1767. From 1776 to 1820 Dutch Franciscans occupied this prefecture. In 1842 it was elevated to the status of apostolic vicariate. Father Mathinus Niweindt, a Dutch secular priest was the vicar until 1860, although he had begun his service as prefect in 1824. In 1843 he became the first bishop of Curacao. The anomalous and unique situation with the slaves in Curacao was that the Calvinist and Jewish businessmen did not allow blacks to become their coreligionists. Even the Jewish merchants, breaking their long-standing Sephardic traditions did not circumcise their slaves, rather allowing them to become Catholics. Catholicism was a sign of being black and a slave.

One of the conflicts that arose was the issue of slave marriages, which were supposed to take place before civil magistrates before going to the religious ceremony. The slave masters and merchants did not want to allow the slaves to be married because this impeded their sale or transfer to other estates. Many slaves fled to Venezuela to earn their freedom and practice their faith more freely. Around the city of Coro many former Curacao slaves who earned their freedom by fleeing ended up forming whole barrios of freemen. In 1785 the Dutch authorities prohibited the apostolic prefect from performing marriages of slaves. In the 1795 slave rebellion Franciscan Father Schinck, acted as a mediator between the civil authorities and the slaves. The slaves convincingly argued that they should be recognized as human beings, and not be treated worse than animals. In 1817 Franciscan Father J. Stöppel argued before the Dutch king that slaves ought to be allowed to marry in the Catholic faith with civil recognition and to baptize and raise their children in the Catholic Faith. This, however, was deemed dangerous by the authorities.

But the Catholic Church, in a curious turn of history, had little to do with the abolition of slavery in the Dutch Antilles, an abolition that benefited only the Catholics on the island. Bishop Niewindt himself, it was noted by Father J. Putman, was a slave owner. This priest who criticized the bishop was asked to resign his post and he returned to Holland in 1853. The bishop was in favor of a gradual abolition of slavery; Father Putman was in favor of an immediate abolition. As Cuba and Puerto Rico, latecomers to the sugar cane trade, prospered in the 19th century, the Lesser Antilles deprived of their forced labor (slaves), withered. After 1815, the islands were bankrupt. Trade with Venezuela, exchanging Venezuelan products for European manufactured goods, was henceforth the only significant economic activity carried on in these islands up the arrival of the Shell Oil refinery in 1915. There was no more slave trade after the British started enforcing the trade ban in 1814. Many Dutch colonists moved to the new Republics in North and South America. Slavery was abolished in Curacao at a rather late date (1863). The slaves at St. Marteen mutinied after the French side of the island (St. Martin) abolished slavery in 1848. There the slaves forced the authorities to grant them legal freedom on their own initiative. Not so in Curacao.

Catholics in the Netherlands were an oppressed significant minority. When in 1870 the Dutch Dominicans arrived in Curacao they brought with them the concern that the Irish had had with the English: complete equality as opposed to second-rate citizenship. In Curacao this demand for equality before the law was compounded by the fact that Catholics were mostly blacks. The Dominicans worked very hard at organizing the Catholic workers into cooperatives and following the Dutch model, a workers union was formed in 1919. The Shell refinery had established itself in Curacao in 1915. Catholic schools, newspapers and even a Catholic party were founded. In 1922, under Catholic inspiration, workers on the island held a first general strike. In 1948, though, the Catholic party was defeated.

By 1958 Curacao was made a bishopric but it still mostly depended on foreign and religious clergy. The first native-born priest to be elevated to the Curacao bishopric was consecrated in 1973. Catholic schools comprised 75 percent of all primary and secondary schools on the island.

The British plundered St. Eustatius in 1781 because it was a smuggling colony within sight of British St. Kitts, which supplied North American colonists in their rebellion against the British. After this most merchants from St. Eustatius moved into neutral Danish St. Thomas. St. Marteen lived off cattle raising and salt ponds. After the slaves got their emancipation in 1848 the local economy collapsed on this island. Subsistence farming and more recently, tourism have been the mainstay of the economy of these Leeward Dutch islands.

The French Islands: Martinique, Guadalupe, Dominica and St. Lucia. Columbus discovered Guadalupe on his second voyage in 1493. Abandoned like all the Lesser Antilles by the claimant, it was raided by the Spaniards so as to chastise Carib Indians. It was not until 1635 that the French occupied it. Some of the planters that came from St. Kitts took the initiative. In 1627 the French Company, the Compagnie des Indes, which was in charge of making a profit, sold Grenada and St. Lucia to Sieur du Parquet and more French planters arrived there as well. The pioneers in Guadalupe and Martinique were Normans, Bretons and Gascons, later joined by Irishmen who were fleeing British terror in their native land and had gone to France seeking refuge. At first they turned it into a tobacco plantation island. But then the shift to the more profitable and more labor consuming sugar cane plantations took place.

The French experiment with island colonies was similar to the British and Dutch experiences: commercial companies. These private entrepreneurs, like their English and Dutch counterparts, had little desire to establish bishoprics (and indirectly royal control) in the West Indies. This not only meant that the local civil authorities would have more power over priests but also that the local planters tended to diminish the influences of priests over their slaves. Profit, not evangelization, was the main concern of the early settlers that came to these difficult forsaken places. Religious life was not a paramount concern for them.

When the first French priests arrived they were quite concerned with the evangelization of the fierce Caribs in Martinique, Guadalupe and Dominica. During the early period the natives helped supply the European settlers. But some of the black slaves brought to the young plantations ran away and joined the Caribs. In 1632 Father Raymond Breton wrote a Carib dictionary and catechism. In 1666 Father du Tertre, a Dominican friar, began his ministry in St. Lucia as Abbé Jean Baptiste Labat, another Dominican, would do at the end of the 17th century. They learned the Carib language in order to preach the Gospel to them in their own tongue. Up to 1685 the missionaries tried to teach the Caribs but there was very little success in converting many to the Catholic faith.

As the Caribs were driven away from Martinique and Guadalupe and took refuge in Dominica, a peace treaty was signed with them (1660), but planters still needed laborers, who were recruited in Paris, Brittany and Normandy. These "engagés" or indentured servants usually had three years of obligatory labor for those who brought them over. But as tobacco planting was substituted by the more difficult sugar cane planting, black slavery substituted indentured French servants. Already by the second half of the 17th century the black slaves were more than half the population of the island of Guadalupe, even while 3,083 whites still remained as settlers. In 1664 Governor De Tracy ordered the evangelization of the black slaves under penalty of a fine. By 1685 King Louis XIV had issued the Code Noir in order to further direct the incorporation of African slaves into West Indian society as Catholic subjects. Blacks seem to have been eager participants in catholic ceremonies: Sunday was the only day they could rest and get together. Priests insisted on black slaves' right to marry, even if this made their master's ability to exchange or sell them more difficult. During the first decade of their adaptation to their new home their death rate was very high.

Religious orders, like the Capuchins, and later the Jesuits, Dominicans and Carmelites were active on the islands. They were very subservient to the Crown that paid their passage and their salaries once in the West Indies. The Jesuits were especially active among the slaves, having learned their language: a blend of Spanish, French, Dutch and English. In contrast with the Spanish islands, in the English and Dutch islands the European languages were transformed into patois or altogether different languages, as was the case with Creole in Haiti.

Some Huguenots and Jews also came over to these islands. The economic connections of both these groups were necessary if the colony was to survive. Benjamin de Costa, a Sephardic Jew, was one of those who introduced sugar cane cultivation to Martinique in 1654. Also the few Europeans had to stand united against the Carib threat. French Protestants controlled the financing and the main sugar cane mills. At one point Protestants owned two-thirds of the Company fleet ships. There was a certain rivalry between these religious groups in the French Indies. This was a constant feature of the religious diversity that all the Lesser Antilles experienced to a lesser or greater extent; an extreme contrast to the purely European Catholic Quebec and Puritan New England.

During the Seven Years War, from 1759 to 1762, Britain occupied all the French islands in the Lesser Antilles. French planters insisted on maintaining their laws even under British domination. When this war was over, France had to choose between the racially homogenous model colony of Quebec or the economically more prosperous islands of Martinique and Guadalupe. Such was the importance of these little islands to the Mother Country that France chose to abandon Quebec with a serious British insistence. The expectations to take over all of Saint Domingue (Haiti and the Spanish Santo Domingo) would soon prove the fatal mistake French politicians had made. It was a great stroke of British diplomacy and war. After the French Revolution, Saint Domingue rebelled and the French were never able to recover this, the most prosperous of the slave colonies.

Some of the priests who were fleeing revolutionary France came to Martinique and Guadalupe. Abbé Le Goff was one who came to Martinique after spending some time in England, and also helped the newly elected bishop of Trinidad, Bishop Buckley.

Between 1852 and 1887 Guadalupe planters received 45,000 East Indian and 5,800 African laborers, while Martinique received 29,400 East Indians and 10,500 Africans. Most of the East Africans stayed. After 1870 the islands were integrated into France, and the people given privileges to study in France like other French citizens and also to elect their own home rule. These islands were treated as a special departments of France itself.

St. Lucia, discovered in 1506, along with Dominica was Carib territory. The French tried variously to dominate it. It became the focal point of the French Caribbean navy. It was lost to the French after a naval battle in 1797 and passed on to the hands of the British who officially controlled it from 1803 to 1979 when it became independent. Tobago, Granada, Dominica and St. Vincent also passed permanently into British hands. In 1850 Roseau, Dominica, was made a diocese, which included the Leeward and Virgin Islands. Presently it has an American Redemptorist as bishop. It is a suffragan see of Castries, St. Lucia.

The Virgin Islands. Discovered by Columbus on his second trip in 1493, St. Croix harbored fierce Caribs that assailed Columbus. Their warriors raided various villages in eastern Puerto Rico and eventually attacked San Juan itself in 1530. Spanish expeditions launched from Puerto Rico depopulated their inhabitants. As with most other Lesser Antilles they could not sustain nor attract the Spanish claimants, so both the French and the English tried to occupy them during the late 17th century. They were too close to Puerto Rico for the Spaniards to lay still. Only upon sale of the islands to the Danes, a minor European power, were the Spaniards at ease. After 1754 these islands came under the direct rule of the Danish Crown and St. Thomas was declared a free port. But even so, after the 1830s foreign trade declined, as did sugar cane plantations. Slaves were resold in Fajardo and Puerto Rico, and St. Thomas supplied the latest European goods to Puerto Rico's young consumer market in an official trade. English was adopted as the local language of schools after 1850. Occasionally slaves would run away to Puerto Rico to gain their freedom. The roots of Catholicism in the Danish Virgin Islands date to Spanish merchants as well as French planters and entrepreneurs living there.

In March of 1804 Bishop Carroll of Baltimore was instructed by the Propaganda Fide to minister to the needs of Catholics in the Danish Islands. He did indeed send some priests to help. In 1818 Rome put these islands under the jurisdiction of the newly created apostolic vicar for the English speaking islands.

In 1848 as they were expecting emancipation a slave rebellion broke out in St. Croix. With the help of Spanish troops from Puerto Rico, it was quelled. Freedom was promised, but like in contemporary Puerto Rico, compulsory work was required of the technically free blacks. Even though liberty was given to 17,000 slaves in St. Croix on July 3, 1848, full legal freedom came only in 1878. Many decided to leave for the neighboring islands, both Spanish and British. From 1835 to 1911 the Danish Virgin Islands' population declined almost by half in St. Croix, by two thirds in St. John and by a third in St. Thomas.

In 1850 the Danish Virgin Islands and the Leeward Islands were separated from the Trinidad Diocese and belonged to the new Diocese of Roseau in Dominica. In December of 1855 the papal legate who was visiting Charlotte Amelia, Monsignor George Talbot, encountered a schism among the parishioners of Saints Peter and Paul Church in St. Thomas, the only Catholic Church on the island. The bishop at Roseau was not able to solve the dispute. The Propaganda Fide was asked by the legate on behalf of Pope Pius IX to entrust this mission to the Redemptorists, who were versed in English, Spanish and French, which were the languages used on the Danish Virgin Islands. It was the first foreign mission outside of Europe and continental United States given to the Redemptorist Fathers. One of the founders of the Redemptorist Province of North America, Father Joseph Prost, was in charge of the two brothers and the other priest who were to take charge of the St. Thomas Parish. He presented his credentials to the bishop in Dominica in 1858. The bishop reassigned the Redemptorists to the Holy Cross Parish in Christiansted, St. Croix. The three other Redemptorists arrived a little later (on April 24, 1858) from New York, but one brother died of smallpox before disembarking and they were quarantined.

On June 1, 1858 Father Louis Dold, a member of the American province was named pastor of Saints Peter and Paul in St. Thomas. The lack of personnel was a serious problem for the small band of Redemptorists, even after the arrival of two new members from the American province and one from England. Eventually Rome decided they should have just one parish, the one in St. Thomas, and after other deaths due to typhoid the first superior, Father Prost returned to Austria. The new superior in St. Thomas, a Belgian Redemptorist by the name of Father Louis De Buggenoms, would eventually be entrusted the Dominican Republic as vicar apostolic in 1866. The Redemptorists established schools for the poor so as to educate them first of all in the Faith. In 1874 De Buggenoms established an academy of higher studies called St. Thomas College.

Some vocations started to come from St. Thomas for the Redemptorist Congregation. Charles Warren Currier was the first native of St. Thomas to be ordained a priest in Amsterdam on Nov. 24, 1880. The St. Thomas Redemptorists preached missions in the neighboring islands of Tortola (British Virgin Islands), Montserrat, Antigua, St. Kitts, Dominica and Saba. In 1873 the bishop named the local Redemptorist superior as vicar general of the diocese. In 1880 the secular priest, pastor of St. Patrick's in Fredericksted in St. Croix was consecrated as bishop for the Diocese of Roseau. His former parish was given over to the Redemptorists from Canada who arrived in 1891. Belgian, American, English, Austrian, Canadians and Dutch Redemptorists worked in the Virgin Islands those last years of the 19th century, but another native priest, Father William Cletus Stafford, also served and died there.

Being economic liabilities for the Danish government, it approved the sale of the islands to the United States as early as 1867. This did not become a reality until 1917, during World War I. When the Diocese of Ponce was created in 1924, the Danish and British Virgin Islands were separated from the Roseau Diocese and placed under the jurisdiction of the American bishops in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The Virgin Islands became a prelature on April 30, 1960 and became a part of the suffragan see of San Juan when that archdiocese was created in April of 1960. Its first bishop was understandably a Redemptorist, Father Edward Harper. He founded a Catholic High School in St. Croix and founded new parishes in both St. Croix and St. Thomas (outside the capital of Charlotte Amelia). After April of 1977, when Charlotte Amelia became a diocese it was attached to the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. as a suffragan see. Bishop Harper was its first resident bishop, who retired in 1985 and was succeeded by Capuchin Bishop O'Malley. This diocese has mostly depended on transient priests and religious orders and has had no native born bishops. It now has a diocesan bishop. In 1989 the Redemptorists left their important St. Thomas Parish, but to this day, they still have Christiansted under their care.

The Redemptorists took care of Tortola Catholics from their St. Thomas base. In 1957 the first Catholic Church was constructed on the island. The British Virgin Islands are now part of the Diocese of Antigua. In Virgin Gorda Catholics have used the Anglican church for their own Masses until recently, for they still have no Church of their own.

Other islands. Barbados, the oldest English Caribbean colony was occupied in 1623. St. Kitts followed shortly thereafter. By 1645 there were 11 Protestant parishes on the island. Most of the migrants there were indentured servants. Tobacco was the cash crop that made the island prosper. Nevis and Barbuda were occupied in 1628, Antigua and Monserrat in 1632.

French and English colonists, jointly occupied St. Kitts in 1626. They feared both Carib and Spanish attacks. By 1671 firmly in British hands, Protestant parishes were established in St. Kitts as they were established in Nevis and Montserrat. But there always remained a group of French Catholic planters that demanded their own Catholic pastors. A similar situation reigned in Monserrat, where many of the original planters had come from Ireland. The most serious problem of these small islands with mixed religion and national origins was the absence of Catholic clergy and the ignorance of their Catholic faith.

At first there was a policy of toleration of Catholics in the face of a superior Spanish fear. But with increasing Puritan intolerance Catholics were not to be tolerated. Quakers and other Protestant dissidents were to migrate elsewhere. There was also a problem of staffing these islands with Protestant clergy. These island churches were technically controlled by the very distant London bishop. The Spanish solution of central organization for early control did not exist in these islands. The local planters tended to control the pastors and their preaching and influence over the slaves. The pastors had little spiritual and moral influence over the pretentious colonists. Only in 1824 was an Anglican bishop, William Coleridge, named for these islands, and he was to be stationed in Barbados. Pastors were really subjects of the local officials of the Company or the Crown. Slaves were not to be evangelized. Barbados finally got a Catholic bishop in the person of Anthony Dickson, bishop of Bridgetown in 1971.

The Antigua Diocese that includes Montserrat, Nevis, St. Kitts, Barbuda, Anguilla and British Virgin Islands was created even later on, when Jamaican Donald Reece, former rector of St. Michael's Seminary, was made Antigua's bishop in 1981.

Granada is 65 percent Catholic, has its own Antillean bishop, Sydney Charles, since 1975. St. Vincent and the Grenadines form another diocese, with Trinidadian Robert Rivas, O.P., as bishop.

St. Lucia was mostly Catholic, since it had been developed by the French, but it lacked priests. Eventually, though, the importance of this Catholic population was recognized when it was made a diocese in 1956 and an archdiocese (Castries) in 1974, and was given in the person of Bishop Kelvin Felix a native Dominica-born archbishop. The island population at present is 86.7 percent Catholic.

The Bahamas are not on the Caribbean, but on the Atlantic seaboard. This long chain of rather dry islands was the first place to be visited by Columbus on his discovery of America on Oct. 12, 1492. The Spanish depopulated them by waving slave raids of the native Arawaks called the Lucayos. The islands were spurned because they lacked mineral resources, foodstuffs and even fresh water. The process of incorporation of these difficult islands into the British colonial system in the New World followed this route: first came the Company of Adventurers, then the Proprietors from the Carolinas and finally the Crown took full control of the colony (1718–1787).

Dissenters from Bermuda were the first to settle the islands with permanence, in particular the island of Eleuthera. Bermudans dumped their social undesirables in the Bahamas. These dwellers were rather poor and depended more on the sea than on the land resources. A salt industry was developed in the Turks and Caicos part of the Bahamian chain. In the early 18th century the Crown governors themselves were traders in slaves, although the majority of Bahamians were still white. Since the Bahamian whites were quite remiss about their own practice of the Christian faith, they were even less eager to share it with their new slaves. In 1776 they were briefly taken over by the rebellious North American colonists. In 1781 the Spanish briefly captured them. Many North American loyalists settled in the Bahamas. In 1810 there were 4,232 Whites and 11,477 slaves. Thanks to the poor fertility of the soils Bahamian slaves were not as concentrated as others in English islands. They were employed in all sorts of occupations, since the islands were not primarily for agricultural exploitation. In 1834 slavery was abolished there.

But the Catholic Church was conspicuously absent up to these times in Bahamian history. The Apostolic Prelature of the Bahamas was created at a rather late date, in 1929. It was elevated to an apostolic vicariate in 1941. The Nassau bishopric was established in 1960 and it was a suffragan see to the Kingston Archdiocese until it was made a metropolitan Archdiocesan See in June of 1999. Its present bishop is a Jamaican-born Jesuit.

The Turks and Caicos Islands are still part of Britain's dominion in the West Indies. The Hamilton Diocese in Bermuda was first an apostolic prefecture (1953) and an apostolic vicariate in 1956. On June 12, 1967 it became a diocese and has an American-born religious bishop. It is a suffragan see of Nassau.

The Antillean Episcopal Conference. In the 1960s many islands started to gain their independence. The Holy See has provided for the dismemberment of the larger inter island dioceses into local "national" dioceses. There was a notable increase in the number of native-born originally diocesan priests as West Indian bishops. This had also happened in the Greater Antilles as well. Only the smaller islands, which usually had smaller Catholic populations anyways, have been grouped in with larger island dioceses (e.g., Antigua has the British Virgin Islands, Saba, St. Kitts, Montserrat). The older dioceses have been made archdioceses. The archdiocese of Port of Spain (Trinidad) has as suffragan sees the Dioceses of Paramaribo, Georgetown in Guyana and Willemstad in Curacao; the Archdiocese of Castries (in St. Lucia), has Kingstown in St. Vincent and St. Georges in Grenada as suffragan sees; the Archdioceses of Roseau (in Dominica), Nassau (Bahamas) and Kingston (Jamaica), has Belize in Central America as a suffragan see; finally there is the Archdiocese of St. Pierre-Fort de France (Martinique), which has Basse-Terre in Guadalupe and Cayenne in South America as suffragan sees.

The Antillean Bishop's Conference gathers all the non-Spanish West Indies except Haiti and also mainland countries like British Guyana, Dutch Guyana (Suriname) and French Guyana (Cayenne) as well as Belize and English-speaking islands in the North Atlantic region (Bahamas, Bermuda).

Some of the islands, however, remain attached to their former colonial masters: Turks and Caicos, Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, St. Marteen. Efforts on the part of CELAM (Latin American Episcopal Council) to include the various language groups in the fragmented Caribbean have lead to an insistence on the peculiarity of the Caribbean region within CELAM. More meetings are being held in the non-Spanish islands and some efforts at the level of seminary formation have succeeded in strengthening the feeble ties between the Caribbean islands which after such an important part of their history have been separated not by spatial distances but by national colonial interests.

Conclusions. If we are to synthesize we should say that the non-Hispanic West Indies had a very different ecclesiastical history from their Spanish neighbors. The Catholic Church, except in the French islands, existed as a minority within a plurality of religious denominations. It was not Episcopal from its inception, but took a long time to have its local bishops. The first efforts to colonize began in the 17th century. Scarcity of priests with diverse national origins and a mere transitory service would be common even unto the 19th century. Religious orders were the ones involved in the evangelization of the native remnant populations: some, like the Spanish Capuchins in Trinidad, were more successful than others (e.g., the French in Dominica, Martinique, Guadalupe, St. Lucia). Diocesan priests usually did not fare as well as Religious priests in the pastoral work on the islands. The parishioners tended to be of different linguistic groups. Religious ignorance was rampant. Many islands changed colonial masters and this created a peculiar situation: British or Dutch official intolerance combined with actual accommodation.

These islands had a very unsettled population as well as European high mortality rates and absentee ownerships of huge estates. A very frequent feature in Caribbean Catholic history is that lay and priest refugees from neighboring countries in turmoil tend to take over "permanent residence" and work in their tentative home. Intra island migration is also a consistent feature of pastoral reality on these islands: even slaves were resold in neighboring islands when sugar plantations were no longer viable in the older, soil depleted islands. Freed blacks sometimes preferred to leave the island where they had been slaves and get other employment in other islands. Such was the case in the Danish Virgin Islands after the abolition of slavery in 1848. Spanish laws in the late 18th century allowed for runaway slaves from English, Dutch and French islands to get their freedom once they professed the Catholic Faith on Spanish territory. This was a significant problem in Curacao, where many slaves fled to Venezuela to gain their freedom. Refugees from the wars of Venezuelan independence also came to Trinidad. Jamaicans looking for work went to Cuba in the 19th and 20th century to work in sugar plantations there. Jamaicans also worked in the construction of the Panama Canal. Many also went to the Caribbean coasts of Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, where they keep their eminently Protestant and English distinctiveness in a Hispanic context of young countries that are still trying to integrate these differing Caribbean coastal areas to their national identity and to their political and social integrity. Even today Colombians fleeing violence in their native country have sought employment in the smaller islands: in the Cayman Islands, for example, the Bishop of Montego Bay has to find Spanish speaking priests for them. Priests and other religious fleeing religious persecution in recently established Communist rule in Cuba and the later years of the Dictatorship of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic went to Puerto Rico, as had previously been the case with some loyalist clerics (including one of its 19th century bishops) fleeing the revolt against Spain in Venezuela and Peru.

After the natives were excluded, exterminated or absorbed the two great problems were the uneducated whites, not much inclined to religion, exposed to heterodox neighbors and the issue of slavery. When the semi private commercial Agencies that took over the islands could not depend on indentured servants as a labor force that was increasingly employed in sugar cane cultivation they resorted to massive importation of African slaves. The Spanish and French Crowns had a serious interest in christianizing the African slaves, not so the British (especially the established Church of England). The Dutch slave merchants had no interest at all. But Baptism was more an instrument of domination and pacification than of liberation. The Catholic Church as an institution was not very prominent in the fight for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery as such. The Church grew and prospered in the 19th century, especially with the arrival of new religious orders that belonged to the different colonial masters. The Holy See was active in the organization of the local churches only after the second quarter of the 19th century and it tended to follow the colonial structures, trying to get English priests for English islands and also for the formerly French and Spanish islands than had come under British domination. But it was hampered by its lack of influence in British colonial policies.

No significant ecclesiastical monuments remain from before the 19th century. But Catholicism made a significant contribution to the education of many Catholics and non-Catholics alike in the islands. Especially after 1960, it has become a more diocesan-run institution, with an increasing number of native diocesan West Indian bishops. Many pastoral situations continue to be a challenge, especially the disintegration of the family and the education of the faithful in their own Faith in order to withstand the Pentecostal and neo-African syncretic religious movements. Poverty continues to be a serious problem in the islands among many segments of the population. Migration to the larger islands and to the United States is an escape valve, but evidences the graveness of the problem. Independence has not brought the significant improvement that it promised and the economies continue to be frail and ever dependent on outside factors. Communion has much room to grow among these islands.

Bibliography: j. a. noel, Trinidad, Provincia de Venezuela (Caracas 1972). v. leahy, o.p., Catholic Church in Trinidad, 1797–1820 (Port of Spain 1980); Bishop James Buckley, 1820–1828 (Port of Spain 1980). f. osborne, "La Iglesia Católica en el Caribe de habla inglesa,"; a. lampe, "La Iglesia Católica y la esclavitud en Curacao"; l. hurbon, "La Iglesia Católica y la esclavitud en las Antillas francesas durante el siglo XVII"; k. hunte, "Las iglesias protestantes y la esclavitud en el Caribe inglés"; all in Historia General de la Iglesia en America Latina IV, Caribe (Universidad de Quintana Roo, 1995). j. rogozinski, A Brief History of the Caribbean (New York 1999). c. v. black, History of Jamaica (Kingston 1983). d. bisnauth, A History of Religions in the Caribbean (Kingston 1993). m. craton and g. saunders, Islanders in the Stream, a History of the Bahamian People, v. 1 (Athens, Ga. 1999). j. gauci, cssr, Redemptorist Apostolates in the Caribbean of the Nineteenth Century (Santo Domingo, 1989).

[f. b. felices]